Ella Rule, international secretary of the Communist party of Great Britain (Marxist-Leninist), appears as a panel member on (the Iranian state media channel) Press TVs topical discussion program Forum, chaired by Andrew Guilligan.

She explains that far from being a threat to other nations, it is the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (DPRK) who have constantly been the subject of colonial wars and aggression.

Korea fought a stubborn anti-colonial struggle against the Japanese since the latter occupied their country brutally from 1910 until 1945.

The Koreans in fact emerged from the Second World War as a victorious member of the allied forces. But US imperialism, hungry to expand its colonial domination, took up seamlessly from the Japanese in occupying the south of the Korean peninsula, setting up its puppet Syngman Rhee as the head of a fascistic comprador capitalist clique, rather than allowing nation-wide elections as was its obligation; realising that the victorious national liberation forces led by Marxist revolutionaries (Kim Il Sung, et al) would sweep to power.

During its 1950-53 colonial war to prop up the Rhee dictatorship (that makes the Kharzai clique in present day Afghanistan look positively democratic), the US killed some 4 million Koreans (at that time, about one in 5 of the population).

Despite this historic defeat of US imperialism at the hands of the North Korean Peoples army and some million volunteers of the Chinese PLA, the US continues to occupy the south militarily. It has thousands of troops and over 1,000 nuclear warheads stationed on the peninsula, aimed at China, Japan and the DPRK. It has never signed a peace treaty, remains on a war footing and constantly escalates the scale and scope of its provocative military exercises.

What is more, racist US storm-troops are not limited by domestic South Korean laws and regularly commit outrages against the South Korean population, notably raping and murdering civilians.

Both Northern and a substantial majority of the Southern population consider Koreas 72 million population (22 North, 50 South) to constitute a single nation and would dearly love to see their nation re-united. It is the object of the US in its 6 party talks (US, Japan, Russia, China, S Korea and DPRK) to prevent, rather than to facilitate this, lest it loose its strategic foothold in the region. The DPRK continue to work tirelessly for unification, and have proposed a one nation, two systems model for doing so.

What a farce, then, to talk of the North Korean military or nuclear threat to the region, in the face of the real and existential threat that is the USA the only power actually to have used its nuclear arsenal on innocent civilian populations, destroying the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, on August 6 and 9 1945.

And what of the treatment meted out to Iraq? Systematically disarmed by the US (under the aegis of the UN and IAEA) then subjugated and occupied by the US/UK imperialists? Little wonder, then, that the DPRK seek to defend themselves.

Tiny but defiant North Korea, with its 22 million population living in a mountainous territory just the size of Wales, understands only too well Ho Chi Minhs slogan, that Nothing is more precious than independence and Freedom, and it is this greatest of sins - the refusal to be colonized - that has led to Korea being ostracised, blockaded, isolated and propagandized against by the US and its 'democratic allies' / subordinates.

That is why working people of all countries should reject the lead given by their own oppressing classes and support the DPRK whole-heartedly.